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VEAL PIE, GOOD (another way)
Cut a pound and a half of veal cutlet, free from skin and bone, into pieces an inch and a half square, and cut half a pound of thinly-sliced ham into pieces of the same size. Fill a buttered pie-dish with the veal and ham in alternate layers, and place the yolks of four hardboiled eggs on the surface. Mince four button mushrooms, one shallot, and a bunch of parsley. Fry these in an ounce of butter for a few minutes, then pour upon the mixture half a pint of stock or water, and add a small piece of brown thickening or a table-spoonful of flour mixed smoothly with a little ketchup. Simmer the gravy, stirring well until it boils. Add a table-spoonful of lemon-juice, and strain some of the broth upon the veal. Bake the pie in a well-heated oven. Pour a little good gravy into it before serving. Time to bake the pie, an hour and a half to two hours. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for a moderate-sized dish.
A Victorian raised-gravy pie that assumes knowledge the text never states: the pie-dish is meant to be covered with pastry, and the ketchup is not tomato. Read those two points first.
- The missing crustNo pastry is specified in this entry at all. If you read it as a covered pie-dish, which the wording allows but does not state, line the rim, fill, and lay a lid of shortcrust or rough puff over the top, with a vent cut in the centre for the later gravy.
- Ketchup means mushroom or walnutIn a Victorian British kitchen an unqualified "ketchup" is usually a thin, dark, salty mushroom or walnut extract, closer to Worcestershire sauce than to anything tomato. A teaspoon of mushroom ketchup or a dash of Worcestershire gives the intended savour; tomato ketchup will make the gravy sweet and pink.
- Brown thickeningA standing preparation of flour cooked in butter until nut-brown, kept in a jar for gravies. The tablespoon of flour offered as the alternative is the practical route, though browning it in the pan with the mushrooms first gets closer to the original colour.
- Veal cutletHere it means boneless meat from the leg or shoulder cut into collops, not a breaded schnitzel. Ask for boneless veal leg, or use boneless pork shoulder or turkey thigh, both of which behave similarly over a long bake.
- MeasuresHalf a pint is 10 fl oz in British measure, a scant 300 ml. An ounce of butter is 30 g, a pound and a half of veal about 680 g, the half pound of ham about 225 g.
- Oven heat and timeA "well-heated oven" is not defined in the text; roughly 400-425F/200-220C is the usual modern reading. Ninety minutes to two hours at that heat will scorch pastry, so start hot for about 20 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325F/160C for the remainder; the meat needs the long slow spell, not the crust.
- Strain some, not allThe text says to strain only some of the broth onto the veal, and to add more good gravy before serving. Adding less at the start keeps the filling from flooding; the reserved gravy can be poured in hot at the end.
- Egg yolks onlyThe recipe calls for the yolks of four hard-boiled eggs and makes no use of the whites, which are left over for another dish.
- YieldA moderate-sized dish serves four to six. The 3s. 6d. costing is a period retail figure and has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Cold and hot veal-and-ham pies were a fixture of the Victorian middle-class table, and Cassell's gives several versions of the combination: veal is mild and lean, ham supplies the salt and fat it lacks, and hard-boiled egg pads the dish out cheaply while making the cut slices look handsome. The chopped mushroom, shallot and parsley fried in butter is a duxelles in all but name. Cassell's habit of ending each entry with a probable cost belongs to a book written for households running to a budget, for whom knowing that a pie came in at three shillings and sixpence mattered as much as knowing how to make it.